So, since I had the ’65 Volvo P1800 delivered about two months ago, I’ve driven it all of twice, and “driven” is a stretch. Once was babying from the street to our garage, the second time was one block out and back (again babying it to barely keep it running). I’ve come to find I was lied to *heavily* by the classic car dealership I bought it from, both on the overall condition of the vehicle, and just how poorly it was maintained.

Overall, the body is in decent shape. It’s straight, and has a half-ways decent MAACO-level paint job on it, but the lower rear valence is heavily bubbled from sub-paint rust. The interior’s in relatively good shape, but definitely had some serious wear around the edges. Visually-speaking, I will say I like what I got, but there was a whole hell of a lot that they neglected to tell me about.

Electrically… hooooo-boy. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you ever want to look at something, scratch your head, and just say “…. why?” out loud, look up the wiring schematic for a ’65 Volvo P1800. That said, I have never seen so many kludges, hacks, ass-backwards “fixes”, and just “whatever, that works, I guess” things done to a car, and I’m saying that after working on our ’68 Bronco. I’ve spent literal days going over the original schematic to try and wrap my head around what was done to the car by a previous owner (or mechanic, but if it was a mechanic, they should be fired).

I’m definitely doing the car a favor by putting the attention and work into I am. At this point I’m well over $6k into it on parts alone (never mind how much of my time has been spent). I’m lucky I have a innate desire to try and fix and improve things when presented with issues like this, but it still nags at me that I bought this car to just take it and drive it (and definitely spent enough that should have been the case). I keep weighing whether to send a nasty-gram to the dealership that sold it to me, cause I could write a few paragraphs just on the things that were wrong with the car, never mind the things they flat out lied about or neglected to tell me about when I explicitly askes about the condition of the vehicle. Here’s hoping I can get things fixed in a timely fashion, the weather lately isn’t exactly conducive to driving a classic car, but spring and summer are fast approaching and I want to go cruisin’.